by Andy Beckett
The Ecologist’s early staff gave a seminar about the magazine at Eton. Nick Hildyard was in the audience. ‘I was a rebel, taking lots of drugs, and I was looking for an intellectual package that made sense,’ he remembers. He joined the magazine soon afterwards. Despite his schooling, he was a little astonished by some of the gentlemen’s-club attitudes he encountered: ‘The social milieu Teddy was involved with was Aspinall and all that. Teddy would relay to us what they were all saying at the Clermont. That Britain was on the verge of a revolution …’
The Ecologist initially defined its desired readership as ‘the opinion makers’. Its offices were in Goldsmith’s house on Kew Green, an idyll of plane trees and daffodils near the Thames in a prosperous part of west London. Hildyard recalls a sense of heavily subsidized radicalism in the early days: ‘Teddy would be getting rid of a house somewhere to pay the next bill.’ When I went to visit Goldsmith in 2005, he had moved downriver to Richmond, the next-door and even wealthier suburb. ‘I’m at home this afternoon,’ he told me on the phone one September lunchtime, after we had exchanged messages for several weeks. His voice was husky and commanding. ‘Come and see me.’
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It was a hot autumn day, of the kind that had become ominously common in the era of global warming. Hurricane Katrina had just swamped New Orleans. As I walked uphill from the station in the fierce sunshine, jets belching fumes passed overhead headed for Heathrow, and the houses got bigger. Goldsmith’s was near the top of a slope of Victorian villas, two streets away from Mick Jagger’s London residence. It looked no different from its broad, buffed-up neighbours: there were no eco-protest stickers in its sash windows. One ground-floor window, facing the pavement, was confidently wide open, giving onto a long shadowy living room.
Goldsmith came to the door in a tennis shirt. He was seventy-six now, very bony and with a white beard. One trouser leg was caught in his socks, but there was still a faintly messianic strength to his blue eyes. We sat down in the cool darkness of the living room, beneath heavy gold-framed paintings. I asked him about the house. He had had it for twenty years, he said. ‘I thought there were going to be floods, so I didn’t want a place in Chelsea,’ he said with a twinkle. Then the twinkle was gone from his lean face. ‘I don’t see much of a future for the human race,’ he seamlessly continued. ‘I think we’ll probably disappear in the next fifty years.’
From its first issue The Ecologist was tirelessly apocalyptic. The cover photograph was of a man drowning in quicksand, and the cover lines read: ‘Population control for Britain?’ and ‘Can we avoid a world famine?’. Inside were pictures of poisoned industrial landscapes, breathtakingly severe suggestions for ways out of the planetary crisis – ‘why not offer [the public] … a bounty for submitting to sterilization?’ – and a long editor’s letter by Goldsmith that was monumental in its sweep, certainty and sense of doom:
… Human societies … like all other systems, have an optimum structure that cannot be maintained when growth is too rapid and when they are subjected to … the vast urban wastes that we refer to as our cities. When societies cease to display their correct structure they become disorderly … unhealthily preoccupied with the petty and the short-term … a situation which can only lead to further social disintegration …
Forty pages later, in the book-review section, the assistant editor Robert Allen voiced another of Goldsmith’s preoccupations: the superiority of the hunter-gatherer phase of human history over what had followed. ‘It is still an open question whether [modern] man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable ecological conditions he has created,’ wrote Allen. ‘If he fails … interplanetary archeologists of the future will classify our planet as one in which a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an … efflorescence of technology and society leading to rapid extinction.’
In The Ecologist’s offices on peaceful Kew Green, such melodramatic thoughts were not uncommon. Hildyard remembers: ‘My sense was, “There’s this imminent crisis, unless we work together to change things.” That’s quite heady stuff.’ But there was an awareness among the small staff – made up of long-standing Goldsmith acolytes like Allen and much younger volunteers like Hildyard – that their editor and their publication were also deliberately attention-seeking. ‘The writing in the magazine was more aggressive than the feeling in the office,’ recalls Hildyard. ‘Teddy likes to shock.’
Here and there, The Ecologist also contained more measured and genuinely prescient environmental journalism. The first issue attacked nuclear power, citing its accident rate, the possible risk of cancer for those who lived near plants and the difficulty of storing radioactive waste. Detailed critiques followed of Alaskan oil drilling, industrial farming, supersonic air travel and the building of motor-ways to relieve congestion. By 1972, when the magazine’s thinking was distilled into the best-selling paperback A Blueprint for Survival, The Ecologist was a potent mix of cosmic warnings and factual fuel for future green campaigns. And Goldsmith was in demand: ‘I gave a talk to the Liberal Party, and to a mix of Labour and Conservative MPs on Commons committees. Eventually [the newly created environment secretary] Peter Walker asked to see me. I went with several academics. We talked to Walker …’ Perched impatiently on the edge of one of the living-room sofas, Goldsmith gave a snort. ‘… He affected a certain interest in what we were doing. But the great problem was that our solution was just too difficult for him.’ Goldsmith abruptly stood up, began pacing the room and switched to a campaigning present tense: ‘For me economic development is a problem and not a solution. The only thing that can save us is the collapse of the economy.’ He switched back to 1972: ‘Our meeting with Walker – little came of it.’
One of the Blueprint’s recommendations was the establishment of a Movement for Survival, a coalition of green groups that would put pressure on the British government to take the measures – from imposing green taxes and increasing recycling to halving the country’s population – that The Ecologist considered essential. ‘If need be,’ the Blueprint continued, this coalition should ‘assume political status and contest the next general election’. The Movement failed to take off: the existing British conservation and organic-farming lobby groups found the Blueprint too alarmist and authoritarian, and decided against joining. Goldsmith was undeterred. When Walker and Heath’s dream of a streamlined industrial Britain finally collapsed with the 1974 miners’ strike, he ran for Parliament in the February general election.
‘I had no idea where to stand, so I thought, “I might as well find my father’s constituency.” I only found out at the last minute that the seat [Stowmarket in Suffolk] didn’t exist any more.’ He contested a seat elsewhere in the county instead. ‘We took hotels in Framlingham as our headquarters. Most of the people I found to help were hippies. Hair down to their knees, heads enveloped in a blue cloud of marijuana smoke. When I saw them my heart sank’ – an unexpected note of self-deprecation had entered his voice – ‘because these were the readers of The Ecologist at the time. I fought on the soil-erosion issue. The desertification of East Anglia. We needed a gimmick, as there were only a few weeks to the election, so I dressed all my hippies up as Arabs. The clothes came from theatrical costumiers in Jermyn Street. And my friend Aspinall found me two camels to ride on.’ At this, without a flicker of embarrassment, Goldsmith took me upstairs to his bedroom, which was piled with papers and photo albums and books and files, even on the bed itself. He rummaged around for a minute, and then found an old picture of a cluster of long-haired men, wearing ankle-length Arab robes in low winter sunlight, lifting him onto a huge, hairy-faced camel. Goldsmith’s one concession to the Westminster etiquette of February 1974 was that he was wearing a suit.
Back in the living room, gentlemen’s-club charm in his blue eyes, he continued his account of the election. ‘I used to harangue the local farmers: “Have a look at this camel. In twenty-five years’ time, this will be the only mode of transport betw
een Framlingham and Saxmundham.” Aspinall sent me friends of his to help, sent me people from the Clermont Club. Didn’t get on well with the hippies! Hordes of children followed us around. If children could’ve voted, we’d have won.’ He paused for effect. ‘I got 340 votes. I was somewhat dejected.’
But, by the mid-seventies, other people were also trying to establish a green presence in British mainstream politics. During 1972, shortly after the publication of A Blueprint for Survival, a small group of work colleagues and friends influenced by it began meeting in a pub in an industrial part of Warwickshire to discuss their fears for the environment. The Club of Thirteen, or the Thirteen Club, as they called themselves after the number of people present, soon produced an even smaller offshoot, made up of two solicitors, an estate agent and his assistant. After corresponding fruitlessly with the main political parties, they decided to set up a British green party. The PEOPLE Party announced its arrival with an advertisement in the Coventry Evening Telegraph on 31 January 1973. Candidates were asked to come forward to contest 600 seats at the next general election. In order to avoid an environmental catastrophe, the party’s founders calculated, they would need to be in government by 1990.
The over-optimism and amateurishness of the project seemed to outdo even Goldsmith’s political enterprises. The PEOPLE Party was predictably misspelled by the press as the ‘People’s Party’ and assumed to be a new left-wing group. The party’s chosen colour scheme of coral and turquoise confused things further by coming out as red and blue when reproduced, out of necessity, on cheap printing presses. Goldsmith himself, whom the PEOPLE founders had contacted, became an early member and gave the party his Movement for Survival mailing list. The party held a ‘national conference’ and adopted the Blueprint as its manifesto, with all its electorally indigestible demands and warnings.
At the February 1974 election, PEOPLE managed to put up five candidates, not 600. They did better than Goldsmith: one of the solicitors managed 3.9 per cent of the vote in Coventry North-West, which was respectable for a new minor party, and overall the five averaged 1.8 per cent. But at the October 1974 general election, the average shrank to 0.7 per cent. Goldsmith did not stand at all. In Britain that year, voters did not need environmentalists to tell them that the future was looking ominous.
Yet despite the Arab costumes, the foolish names for their political parties and the overblown campaign rhetoric, the new British greens were not just cranks – or some hippy version of the electioneering pranks of Screaming Lord Sutch. Their critique of the consumer-driven, chokingly industrialized post-war world was a profound and far-sighted one. At a time when the conventional political parties were primarily competing, as ever, over who could best deliver an economic boom rather than a recession, the environmentalists had spotted that man was, as the green thinker E. F. Schumacher put it in his 1973 best-seller Small Is Beautiful, ‘living on the capital of living nature’. Even North Sea oil, the politicians’ great black hope, was going to run out. And although The Ecologist’s circulation stayed in the low thousands, during the seventies its anti-urban, anti-industrial ideas reflected and influenced the broader culture.
Watership Down was published in 1972. Laura Ashley’s peasant dresses sold in great quantities. Led Zeppelin and other hard-rock bands softened their albums with folky interludes. People watched The Good Life on television and spent their weekends visiting villages in the Cotswolds. They tried home brewing. They moved out of the tatty cities to East Anglia and the south-west, the only two English regions to show significant population growth. They talked about self-sufficiency and when the planet’s resources might run out. Even at my old-fashioned boarding school in Berkshire, with its courtyard of parents’ Bentleys and BMWs, we scratched out essays about the end of fossil fuels in double science.
In late 1972, Goldsmith and his magazine left Kew Green for Cornwall. ‘We moved because we wanted to live the life we suggested,’ he told me. ‘We had a small farm, a hundred acres. Cows, an orchard with fifty-five varieties of apple trees. Few gadgets. No central heating. A composting lavatory. It never worked. It stunk to high heaven! Some guest we had poured a bottle of Chanel No. 5 down there. It smelled even worse!’ Up in his bedroom, he showed me some photos of himself in Cornwall in the seventies. His beard was long and straggly, his eyes big and glittering under a dim Atlantic sky. There was a slight self-consciousness to his poses, a touch of the gentleman farmer, but also a pioneer’s determination. Behind him stretched endless muddy fields.
During the mid-seventies, The Ecologist struggled to reconcile Goldsmith’s patrician, sometimes very right-wing environmentalism with the more liberal, sometimes left-wing views of Hildyard and other young British greens, who increasingly saw capitalism rather than over-population or ‘social disintegration’ as the planet’s main problem. In July 1975, Goldsmith’s close ally Robert Allen wrote a notorious article for the magazine, ‘The City Is Dead’, which praised the Khmer Rouge for their recent forced evacuation of urban Cambodia. While acknowledging and regretting that this compulsory return to a rural way of life ‘has probably killed thousands’, and confessing a degree of unease and uncertainty about the Khmer Rouge’s wider intentions, Allen’s article was, in its title and some of its seemingly more heartfelt passages, recklessly and chillingly celebratory:
They [the Khmer Rouge] seem to be doing their best to ensure that urban parasitism cannot reoccur. They have closed the factories, destroyed the urban water supplies, and wrecked the banks, burning their records and all the paper money they can lay their hands on. They have returned to the barter system … If Cambodia succeeds in forging a decentralized rural economy, it will force us to reappraise the prison of industrialism … They deserve our best wishes, our sympathy, and our attention. We might learn something.
In his living room in Richmond, thirty years on, Goldsmith would talk about the politics behind his environmentalism only indirectly. ‘There are a lot of taboo subjects that have to be dealt with,’ he said, and then, a few minutes later: ‘People who think population is the only issue tend to be right-wing. I’ve always considered myself a …’ He paused. ‘I don’t see the Conservatives as true conservatives. I believe in family, locality, religion, in traditional societies very, very strongly indeed … I don’t believe in nationalization, but privatization can make things very much worse. The problem is not who owns or runs the industries. It’s the damage done.’
‘I don’t think Teddy’s a fascist,’ says Hildyard, who left The Ecologist, finally and acrimoniously, in 1997 after Goldsmith had given a speech to an audience including members of the French far right. ‘I retain enormous affection for him. It’s just that a lot of his model-based thinking lends itself to exploitation by very authoritarian groups.’ Goldsmith was equally frank about his fall-out with his former protégé, now a director of the left-wing green campaigning group The Corner House. ‘Nick Hildyard was a very capable young man, very bright,’ he said, not acknowledging that Hildyard had since turned fifty. ‘He was like a son to me. He lived with me for a long time.’ Then came a flash of anger and defiance in Goldsmith’s blue gaze. ‘He belongs to a cult of fanatics of political correctness.’
From 1975, despite similar internal tensions, the PEOPLE Party made some progress towards political maturity. That year, it changed its name to the Ecology Party and abandoned its coral and turquoise colour scheme for a sensible, resonant green. The following year, it agreed a new manifesto. Out went the apocalyptic Blueprint for Survival; in came the milder, more positive Manifesto for a Sustainable Society. Rather than a Year Zero dismantling of modern industrial life, the latter argued for ‘steady’ rather than reckless expansion of the economy, and a green politics aligned with neither the Left nor the Right. The manifesto’s unthreatening-sounding notion of sustainability remained the party’s buzzword and guiding philosophy for the rest of the seventies and far beyond, eventually entering the language of Westminster politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, the more abras
ive energies of British environmentalism were directed into specific campaigns: against nuclear power plants, against toxic waste dumps. ‘I remember going on marches in the late seventies against [the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at] Windscale, getting involved in direct action, sit-ins,’ says Hildyard. ‘It became more empirical.’ At the 1979 general election, the Ecology Party fielded fifty-three candidates, ten times as many as it had ever put up before. Its vice-chairman and one of its main campaign coordinators was, like Hildyard, an Old Etonian, but of a smoother, less radical sort: Jonathon Porritt.
Yet while the British environmentalism of the seventies, even in its most unkempt phases, retained links with the Establishment and the professional classes, there was another potent new political movement, also anti-industrial and boldly utopian, which seemed to have no connection with mainstream British life at all. A fortnight before the October 1974 general election, newspapers and television stations received the following:
ALBION FREE STATE
(a kind of Alternative Society election manifesto)
